Old Mother Curridge (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 4)

by Tim Bryant

  “You happen to know if they’ve pulled any cars in lately?” I said.

  I knew Sheriff King occasionally had some abandoned car towed in. Later, if no one came to claim it, it might eventually be sold for pennies on the dollar. I had almost traded the pickup a time or two that way.

  “We have a towing company do that,” Rella said. “I think they have a couple over there now, but you’d have to talk with them.”

  It didn’t seem worth running down. What were the chances? I wondered if Rella was short for Cinderella, but I didn’t pursue that end either. Rella White would remain a mystery, at least for the time being.

  James Alto was waiting to pick me up in his Oldsmobile station wagon. He lived in an upside down world, waking up to dinner, going out on the town, drinking through half of the night then going to work, tossing newspapers through Fort Worth neighborhoods while honest people slept. Then he ate breakfast, went home and hit the sack.

  In other words, I had already had a long day, which included getting carried away from his place of work in handcuffs, and his day was only beginning. By the time I caught him up on my adventures, he was hesitant to face the day.

  “I’m just glad I never run into her,” he said.

  Ruthie Nell Parker again. How could one woman cause so much trouble with so little effort? James Alto and me went for dinner at Tootie’s Hot Plate where my favorite waitress, redheaded Geneva, gave us free coffee and looked the other way while we added whiskey to taste. We drank a whole pot, then had some eggs and meat before finishing off with more drink. Our spirits were high enough that I decided I needed to get back on the horse that bucked me off. James Alto was headed to the Startlegram to get started on the morning paper, and I was going along for the ride.

  “I’ll ride along and throw papers for you,” I said.

  He wasn’t sure that was such a great idea. Not because of Ruthie Nell, who would be far away and fast asleep.

  “This is a special edition. More sections, more ads. I hate to say I don’t think you can sling ‘em, Dutch, but I don’t know. It’s a hell of a lot of papers.”

  For that reason and that reason only, when we found the International still sitting in the newspaper lot, we decided to switch over and take it. I would drive and he would sling, and we would have a grand time.

  Running newspaper routes is harder work than you think it is. It’s not for schoolboys on bicycles anymore. I was surprised to learn that even folks in places like Battercake Flats took the Startlegram. I wondered how many of them wound up in the outhouses in the back. The paper was bound to be cheaper than tissue paper.

  32

  I pulled into County Line Liquor so Alto could leave a stack of papers. We decided quickly not to waste the opportunity and bought extra drink for the ride, me settling on a bottle of Old Joe and Alto getting a six-pack of Pearl. We settled up, then returned to the truck. I climbed in and glanced into the rear view, ready to back out and be on our way. At first, I thought I was seeing things. Pulling into the lot behind us was a canary yellow Studebaker coupe.

  “Looky what I found,” I said.

  I took one long pull from the Old Joe, wiped my mouth on my shirt sleeve and slid back out into the night, making sure the bottle was safe until I returned. James Alto opened a bottle of beer and watched me.

  I could see that there were two people sitting in the car. They pulled slowly into a parking space at the corner of the building and turned off the engine.

  “Love that car,” I said.

  When the driver stepped out, he was half-lit by the parking lot lights, but I didn’t know him. He looked like a business man. Not the cowboy type. Maybe an out-of-towner. He walked slowly in my direction, and I was making steps to reach out and shake his hand when I saw his riding partner come from the far side of the Studebaker. It took a split second to recognize him.

  Sly Scarbrough.

  “This him?” the driver said to Sly.

  Both were steadily advancing, and I was backpedaling toward the International, wondering if the crowbar was still within reach in the bed.

  “That’s him, Bill,” Sly said.

  I stopped and squared up. The last thing you want to be when you’re under attack is moving backward. Assuming the two goons coming after you are wanting to punch your lights out instead of deliver roses, you’re doing half their work for them if you’re already on your heels.

  “Don’t kill him,” Bill said. “Just mess him up bad enough that he’ll crawl off somewhere and die.”

  Bill. William Silvestri. The son of a bitch had found the truck and followed me. How the hell he picked Sly up along the way, I couldn’t work out.

  “You guys know each other?” I said.

  Bill threw the first punch, which was a haymaker, but it was wild, missing me by half a foot. I moved to the left and managed to move right into Sly and got a punch to the rib cage for my troubles. I swung a hard right and caught Sly on the ear. He didn’t even blink.

  Bill’s second punch hit me square in the sternum and knocked the breath out of me.

  “I read about you killing Sly’s brother Brett,” William Silvestri said. “Fortunately for me, the paper mentioned how you let Sly here get away. I hunted him down.”

  “And then we hunted you down, you fucking reb,” Sly said.

  At least I think that’s what he said. I wasn’t completely sure, and I didn’t ask him to repeat it.

  William Silvestri managed to wrestle himself into position behind me and cut off my windpipe. He squeezed until all I could see was white, but his voice rattled in my head.

  “Beat the shit out of him, Sly.”

  I held my breath and waited for a flurry, and the flurry did come, hard to the face. I tasted blood, but that wasn’t anything new. At least there were no loose teeth. I can’t put my finger on what happened next, but I knew something did. I heard a scream that sounded like Fay Wray when King Kong picked her up. King Kong in this instance was good old James Alto, who had come up behind scrawny Sly Scarbrough and lifted him straight up off the ground. I’m sorry to say I didn’t see it, but Alto would later tell me he grabbed Sly by the scruff of the neck and a handful of balls and slung him sideways against a metal Chesterfield Cigarettes sign. Sensing that his odds had suddenly shifted, William went into a defensive position. I turned around and palmed him good and hard right in the nose. He reached up instinctively, and I followed with a somewhat decent uppercut, which is really the only somewhat decent punch in my artillery. I threw it out of anger, which Slant Face once told me was the worst way to throw a punch. A cool head and a deliberate mind wins the fight, he said. My hot head got in one decent punch, though, and then it was over.

  “You kill him?” William said.

  We all looked over at Sly who laid in a crumple underneath Tyrone Powers, who stood smiling in admiration of what he’d seen, his Chesterfield dangling from his lips.

  Alto walked over and kicked Sly in the ribcage, and Sly hollered out again, not quite as Fay Wray-like but almost.

  “You realize I have to beat you down for what you did, right?” I said.

  William was as big as me, but he was soft. The kind of guy that only liked to hit girls. Maybe puppies. It was why he brought along Sly.

  “I didn’t mean to hit her,” he said. “I let myself get out of control.”

  I appreciated the admission of wrongdoing, but it wasn’t enough.

  “I’m talking about what you did to my truck, Bill,” I said.

  That big black X was starting to get on my nerves. I’ll admit there was maybe a little bit of irony at work but I considered it more like retribution. I got out of control just long enough to put him down next to his friend Sly, who was now looking up at Alto and trying to work out his next move. There weren’t many promising ones from that vantage point.

  Alto reached down and offered Sly a hand up. Sly thought about it for a second and reached up. Alto pulled, and, just as the little bastard got his boots beneath him, he pull
ed Alto and swung a left hook. It caught Alto right on the chin and shook him. I pulled the .38 and pointed it right between Sly’s beady little eyes.

  “Was that bastard Bret Masterson really the son of Bat Masterson?” I said.

  If I now had a handle on the situation, I was going to call court into session.

  “So I was told,” Sly said.

  William didn’t look like he had it in him to get back up again, so I kept questioning the witness.

  “Way I figure it, only way you two are brothers is him being Bret Scarbrough. That about the way it sizes up?”

  I saw that Alto was giving him the eye. When Alto does that, grown man shit his pants. What’s humorous is, if you know Alto at all, you know, under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t hurt a flea. He’ll just about kill a man if he messes with me or Slant Face though. I suppose we would do the same.

  “We ain’t brothers,” Sly said. “I taught that son of a bitch everything he knew.”

  “Including how to get himself killed,” I said.

  Alto pulled William to his feet. William had no fight left in him and only wanted to limp away. I wasn’t going to let that happen though.

  “I’ve got a question or two for you too, Mr. Silvestri.”

  He bent down and grabbed his knees, and I thought he was going to vomit right there in the lot. He was just trying to get his breath back. I had been there.

  “I got nothing to say to you,” he said.

  I decided to see if I could change his mind.

  “You seen your daughter lately?”

  He looked up at me, white as a ghost. He’d just taken a pretty good beating, so it was understandable.

  “Whadda you know about Ginny?” he said.

  Maybe it was my line of questioning that didn’t suit him.

  “I know the cops say she was last seen in a canary yellow Studebaker coupe,” I said.

  I gazed on the coupe just to make my point obvious. William was ready to throw in the towel, if he’d been given a towel to throw.

  “Ginny’s long gone,” he said.

  He sounded like he was pleased to tell me this. I was mystified.

  “You mean dead?”

  He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at a bloody lip.

  “She would be if her momma had anything to do with it,” he said. “She’s living with a musician down in the Acre. Guy called Hilly Driskell.”

  “Hilly Driskell,” said James Alto.

  We both knew Hilly. We didn’t know him on a first name basis— he didn’t know us— but we sure knew about him. Hilly was a guitar player in the style of T-Bone Walker. Was one of the only white boys to play the Rose Room on a regular basis. Hilly had a rep as a smack dealer. He’d never done time for it, but people knew he was connected. He hung with a rough crowd. Played smooth guitar, but...

  “Why the hell she move in with someone like Hilly?” I said.

  Far as I knew, Ginny Silvestri might’ve been a bigger smack fiend than he was, but I doubted it. At least I wanted to doubt it.

  “She didn’t move in with him,” William said. “He moved in with her. He’s living it up in her apartment down on Seventeenth and Calhoun.”

  Seventeenth and Calhoun was the south end of Hell’s Half Acre. A long shout from Peechie Keen’s. The bad end of a bad deal.

  “And her momma has no idea?” I said.

  He looked at me like he’d rather kill me than talk, but he was too tired to fight and too tired to talk too. Fighting in parking lots is a young man’s sport. My lungs were on fire from it, and sucking cold air wasn’t helping a whole lot.

  “Alcohol is good for sore muscles and bruised egos,” James Alto said.

  He turned and walked in the direction of County Line, and we followed one by one, keeping our distance and keeping our eyes on each other.

  33

  I knew where Ginny lived before I knew she lived there. Peechie Keen’s was on Thirteen and Jones. You could walk from there to Seventeenth and Calhoun, which is exactly what I did. Slant Face was there on account of the waste treatment plant being shut down for the day. I asked him about it, but he only said something about sludge digestion and a trickling filter, and I couldn’t make out whether he was talking about work or lunch.

  Slant, having been told about the previous night’s run in with Silvestri and Scarbrough, was worried that I might get into more trouble than I could get myself out of. I think he was just jealous that he hadn’t been along for the ride. Whatever the case, he walked with me down through the Acre on our way to pay Ginny Silvestri, and, if we were lucky, Hilly Driskell a visit.

  “Acre sure has gone downhill,” I said.

  Where it had once put it’s stamp on the city, albeit a stamp of magnificent whore houses and gambling dens all lit up and alluring, it was beginning to fill up with junky little five-and-dime general stores. Stores that, if they were successful at all, were successful because they were fronts for prostitution and gambling. The more things changed, the more people stayed the same.

  Ginny’s apartment was just as expected. She was three flights up in a four level building, all of it constructed before either of us was born and looking like it might not make it to next Christmas. I flashed my out-of-date P.I. license at the landlord, and she coughed Miss Ginny’s number right up. I wanted to take the freight elevator. Slant Face, who has an illogical fear of such contraptions, insisted on the stairs. We took the stairs.

  Hilly Driskell answered the door on the third knock.

  “How’s things, Hilly?” I said.

  He looked like things had been better. I hadn’t seen him in half a year or so, but that half a year hadn’t done much for him.

  “Who are you?” Hilly said.

  I still had my license in hand, so I flashed it again.

  “My name’s Alvis Curridge, and I’m here to talk to Ginny Silvestri.”

  I looked around the room behind him. I was surprised to see it nicely furnished. Far beyond anything I had to show, Ginny had even hung art on the walls. I didn’t see how Hilly was making enough to pay the bills. I wondered what Ginny was up to.

  “You a cop or something?” Hilly said.

  “You got reason to worry about that?” Slant Face said.

  Hilly was momentarily captivated by that Manchester accent, and I took the opportunity to allow myself into the apartment. A Gibson Archtop Hollowbody stood in one corner, a Starlet amp next to it. I couldn’t help wanting to pick it up and strum. Was I jealous of Hilly Driskell? Yes, I guess I was. If I had been given the power to drop everything I had in exchange for everything he had, I probably would have done it.

  “Ginny too?” Slant Face said.

  I wondered if I had been thinking aloud.

  “No, not Ginny,” Hilly said. “I don’t really feel comfortable telling two strange men where she works.”

  “Oh, I’m not that strange at all,” I said. “Now Slant Face here...”

  Ginny was out. Hilly wasn’t sure when she would be back. He wasn’t sure if her boss would like visitors with badges showing up and asking to talk to employees. He didn’t seem all that sure about anything.

  “How you guys afford such a nice place?” I said.

  It wasn’t a leading question. I sincerely wanted to know.

  “Ginny got the place,” Hilly said. “She’s one of those people who’ll save their money for years. I tend to spend it before I get it.”

  Slant sat down on a sofa and picked up the guitar. I could play three or four chords. Enough to strum my way through a few songs. James Alto was a good player. Slant, who sat there holding the guitar, could do neither.

  “Opposites attract,” Slant said.

  I watched Hilly closely but didn’t see any sign of discomfort with what was happening. He looked like someone who was intent on getting back to a good nap.

  “You seen or heard from Donnatella Silvestri?” I said.

  Even if Ginny wasn’t there, I was determined not to let the visit be a comp
lete waste. Hilly seemed to finally awake from his trance.

  “Ginny’s mother hung herself a couple years back,” he said. “Okay, so that’s where she got most of her money.”

  Slant Face almost dropped the guitar.

  “Hung herself?” he said.

  Who the hell was Donnatella Silvestri then?

  “Oh, Donnatella,” Hilly said. “She’s William’s wife, alright. But she’s not Ginny’s mother. She tried real hard to be, but Donnatella was more interested in Ginny’s money than her.”

  I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. I grew up on dime store novels where the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad and you could tell them apart by the hats they wore. I didn’t like them mixing things up, and I didn’t like them fooling with me.

  “William and Donnatella aren’t together anymore,” I said.

  Hilly looked at me like I’d just told him James Dean was dead.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “You also aware William showed up at the house and roughed Donnatella up pretty bad?” I said.

  “That wasn’t all his doing, my friend,” he said. “William was pretty sure Donnatella was cheating on him. They’re still married you know. Anyway, he knew something was up. Finally, he caught the motherfucker right there. Right there in the house, you understand. Messed the dude’s truck up, messed up the dude too, or so I hear.”

  Slant Face laughed, although I’m sure Hilly knew not why.

  William and Donnatella had a bad relationship from day one, Hilly said. How was he to blame for that? He and Ginny got along just fine. If she was here, she would tell you the same. I guess I had to trust him on that one. It had been an interesting visit. I had learned a few things. Had a few new pieces of the puzzle. I thanked Hilly for being so helpful. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a reason to really dislike the guy.

  “So you really think Donnatella was trying to get her hands on Ginny’s money?” I said.

  If Hilly wasn’t ushering us to the door with gifts and hugs, neither was he kicking us out on our asses.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “When Ginny’s having to hide her money under the floorboards in her room, just to keep Donnatella’s hands out of it, you can see that there’s a problem. William finally saw it. He got out.”